Andrew Ng, chief scientist, Baidu, said: “Melody is designed to help both doctors and patients. By focusing on the medical-assistant vertical, we’ve built a conversational bot that can give highly-customized and situation-appropriate responses to a patient’s query.”

“As Melody has more conversations, it will also learn and keep getting better,” added Dr. Ng. “This is just the start of a much larger, AI-driven transformation of the healthcare industry.”

Wei Fan, senior director in Baidu’s Big Data Lab, commented: “With Melody, our goal is to provide patients with an online experience that is close to a human conversation. We believe this natural type of interaction will help patients feel more comfortable with their doctors and result in a more beneficial patient-doctor relationship.”

“The new AI-based medical assistant functionality in Baidu Doctor will increase doctor productivity and enable patients to get quicker answers to their health-related questions,” said Zheng Li, general manager of Baidu’s Medical Services Business Unit.